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This is a reported cultural feature, originally published in Vogue Italia on November 2025

MAXXI Bvlgari Prize 2025: Meet the Three FinalistsThree artists, three distinct practices united by a shared reflection on the body, image and space.

The fifth edition of the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize was unveiled at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, bringing together curators, museum directors and journalists for the announcement of one of Italy's most significant contemporary art awards. Established in 2018 through a partnership between Rome's MAXXI Museum and the Bvlgari Foundation, the prize has become an important platform for emerging Italian artists, supporting practices that have gone on to gain international recognition. This year's finalists are Chiara Bersani, Adji Dieye and Margherita Moscardini. Though their practices differ significantly in form and approach, all three artists explore the body, image and space as tools for understanding and interpreting the contemporary world. "Three artists, three distinct trajectories, united by a reflection on the body, image and space as tools for knowledge and storytelling," said MAXXI Artistic Director Francesco Stocchi.

The first finalist is Chiara Bersani, a performance artist born in 1984 in San Rocco al Porto, near Lodi. Living with osteogenesis imperfecta, Bersani has placed her own body at the centre of her artistic practice. Her work is grounded in the idea of the "political body": a body that refuses to be defined by the gaze of others and instead challenges and reshapes it. In her performances, the body becomes both medium and message, questioning the narratives that continue to shape perceptions of disability. The jury praised what it described as Bersani's "transformative power", noting that her body "does not merely occupy space, but becomes a voice and a site of reflection, a political subject in its own right." Through her work, corporeality becomes both a form of resistance and a space for collective encounter. The second finalist is Adji Dieye, a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Milan and Dakar. Her research examines how national narratives are constructed through institutions, public space and systems of representation. Working across photography, video, installation and architecture, Dieye investigates the ways collective and individual identities are shaped by the structures that surround them. Her acclaimed project Culture Lost and Learned by Heart, presented at C/O Berlin in 2021, explored the archive as a site where power, memory and national identity intersect. For the artist, process is inseparable from the work itself. "Between Dakar, Milan and New York, perspectives change," she explains, “what interests me is seeing how a project can acquire different meanings depending on who is looking at it."

The third finalist is Margherita Moscardini, born in Livorno in 1981. Her work explores the relationship between objects, architecture and the spaces they inhabit, investigating how matter and context can become instruments of political transformation. One example is Bethel Chapel's Annex (2023), a 500-square-metre carpet inspired by an extraordinary event in the Netherlands, where religious leaders held a continuous church service for months in order to prevent the deportation of an Armenian family.
Questions of territory, sovereignty and belonging are central to Moscardini's practice. "Law is one of my materials," the artist says, describing legislation as a living element that actively shapes the work. The jury highlighted the rigorous relationship between theory and form that characterises her practice, noting that her projects examine not only physical space but also the social and political structures embedded within it.

Together, Bersani, Dieye and Moscardini represent three distinct approaches to some of the most pressing questions in contemporary art today. Their works will be presented at MAXXI in Rome in autumn 2026, where one project will ultimately be selected to join the museum's permanent collection.

This piece appeared in a shortened version in the October 2025 issue of Vogue Italia
The new exhibition about Virgil Abloh in Paris tells us why he revolutionized the way we think about fashion
Opening on September 30 – what would have been the designer’s 45th birthday – at the Grand Palais, the largest European exhibition dedicated to his work: Virgil Abloh: The Codes

On September 30, 2025, Virgil Abloh would have turned 45. His birthday, which usually fell during Paris Fashion Week, became an occasion for friends and collaborators to meet in the city. In 2014, the designer entered the official calendar with his brand Off-White, and in 2018 he was appointed creative director of Louis Vuitton. This appointment made him not only the first African-American creative director of the maison, but also the first to lead a French fashion house. That same year, the Time included him on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Abloh loved to repeat that everything he did was “for the seventeen-year-old version of himself,” to open the doors to a world that had long seemed inaccessible. Born in 1980 in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian parents, he studied civil engineering and then architecture in Chicago, while moving between music, graphic design and fashion. In 2009 he interned at Fendi. Three years later he launched Pyrex Vision, a short-lived project that immediately became a cult capable of redefining the idea of desirability. In 2013 he founded Off-White, and in 2018 he was nominated artistic director of the menswear line of Louis Vuitton. In November 2021, the designer passed away due to an aggressive form of cancer.

Four years later, Abloh’s legacy returns to Paris with Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first major European exhibition dedicated to his work. Staged at the Grand Palais – recently reopened after a long restoration – the show opens on September 30, his birthday, and runs through October 10. The exhibition is curated by longtime collaborators Chloé and Mahfuz Sultan together with Shannon Abloh, the designer’s wife and president of the Virgil Abloh Foundation. On view there are around one thousand pieces selected from a monumental archive of twenty thousand objects: prototypes, garments, sneakers, furniture, photographs, notes, sketches, and screenshots of WhatsApp conversations.

At the Grand Palais, the Abloh method is laid bare: for every object that became iconic, there are dozens of tests, sketches and exchanges with collaborators. Everything has the same importance and develops within the same creative flow. Inside the exhibition, the “codes” become visual matter, passions and obsessions that cut across fashion, architecture, music, graphic design and product design. The aim, the curators explain, is to convey “all the ways Virgil thought” Beyond the exhibition itself, the program includes workshops, performances, screenings and digital activities open to the public.

When asked for an opinion about the future of streetwear, Abloh replied that it would die. It wasn’t an ending, but a provocation: the dialogue he sparked will forever continue to change form.

This s a critical exhibition review, published on Archive PDF in December 2025

The Luminous Force of the Feminine at Paris Photo 2025

Paris Photo – the world’s leading fair devoted entirely to photography – returned to the Grand Palais with its dense choreography of galleries, publishers, curators, and artists. This year’s edition brings together 222 exhibitors: 179 galleries and 43 publishers from 33 countries, including 60 first-time participants and several notable returns. The fair unfolds inside the newly reopened Grand Palais, in the heart of the 8th arrondissement. The space is dense with cultural memory: for decades, it hosted Chanel’s fashion shows, including most recent Matthieu Blazy’s debut. Its history stretches back to the 1900 Exposition Universelle, and walking inside the building to visit the exhibition it is impossible not to feel the building’s immense curatorial and architectural force.

This edition is unmistakably shaped by a distinctly feminine presence, a strong visibility of women photographers, female subjects, and ways of seeing and portraying women. As artistic director Anna Planas explained, the whole curatorial team is female, and while they no longer think explicitly in terms of gender, the growing number of women photographers in the selection naturally brings this perspective to the forefront.

At the entrance, the tone was set by the monumental work of Sophie Ristelhueber, presented by Galerie Poggi. Nearby, Donna Trope brought a sharp contrast with her bold and playful close-ups. In her work, Trope plays with exaggeration and theatricality, merging artifice and intimacy with a sense of “conceptual mischief”. Going further inside the fair, the Japanese presence emerged with particular strength. At its center is Rinko Kawauchi, whose soft, luminous palette has defined her visual language for decades. The photographer composes delicate beings, natural forces and domestic fragments with the same quiet strength. This sensitivity to the body and emotional form was echoed in the work of Sayuri Ichida, the Japanese-born, UK-based photographer whose images merge the human form, landscape and architecture into geometric continuities.
Another relevant voice in this year’s selection was Justine Tjallinks, the Dutch photographer who transitioned from fashion to fine-art portraiture. Inspired by Old Flemish Masters and threads of magical realism, Tjallinks works with a layered editing process reminiscent of painting. Exploring the space further, it was impossible not to stop by the work of Jack Davidson, who explores surrealism infused with Baroque contrasts. Known for his preference ofblack-and-white, Davison presented a portrait series rooted at his core: street-cast sitters transformed through the sculptural power of the light.

This is a reported cultural feature, originally published in Vogue Italia on 22 October 2025, you can find the original article here
The Louvre Heist:Why We Can’t Stop Thinking About the Stolen Jewels
On Sunday 19 October, four men dressed as construction workers walked into the Louvre Museum and walked out with tiaras, necklaces and earrings that once belonged to Napoleon. Several days have already gone by, and yet for some reason we just can’t stop talking about it. “The loss,” says a professor at the École du Louvre, “is not just ours, but that of generations to come.”

The operation lasted a total of seven minutes. At 9:30 a.m., four masked men arrived from Quai François-Mitterrand in a moving truck, parking it along the side of the building that faces the Seine. On the flatbed, a cherry picker. Two of them, dressed as construction workers in high-visibility vests, lifted themselves up to the first floor, forced open a window in the Denon wing and entered the Galerie d’Apollon – the most lavish room in the Louvre. Armed with an angle grinder – and then they cut through two of the new steel display cases installed after the 2020 renovation. In a matter of minutes, they made off with eight jewels from the Diamants de la Couronne collection: a tiara, a necklace and a sapphire earring that belonged to Maria Amalia and Hortense de Beauharnais; a reliquary brooch, a necklace and a pair of emerald earrings of Marie-Louise of Austria; and two pieces belonging to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, her pearl tiara and the diamond-studded corsage bow. A ninth object, Eugénie’s crown, created by Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier for the 1855 Exposition Universelle, fell during the escape. The crown was later found on the asphalt in front of the museum, slightly damaged. By 9:38 a.m. the thieves had vanished, riding off on two Yamaha T-Max scooters in the direction of the Hôtel de Ville. A helmet was found under the truck and is now being analysed by experts to extract DNA. The Louvre remained closed all day, while the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation with the BRB, the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme, and the Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Goods.

The Crown Jewels of France were conceived in the 16th century, when Francis I decided that part of the royal treasures would no longer belong to the sovereign, but to the Crown itself. The collection was designed to express the power of the monarchy through its stones: diamonds, sapphires, emeralds and pearls that became political emblems as well as luxury objects. Henry IV and Louis XIV turned them into symbols of absolute monarchy, using them as tools of splendour and propaganda. Two centuries later, Napoleon Bonaparte reinvented them for his own coronation. Then came the empresses – Marie-Louise, Maria Amalia and Eugénie de Montijo – who, with their parures of diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, added further details to a collection that, over time, has become bigger than its owners.
But France’s jewels have never had an easy life. Between 11 and 16 September 1792, in the chaos of the French Revolution, a group of thieves broke into the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne, which stood on what was then Place Louis XV, today’s Place de la Concorde. For several consecutive nights, they stole diamonds, pearls and rubies. Among the most famous pieces were the Sancy, the Regent and the Blue Diamond of the Crown, which many believe later became the Hope Diamond, now at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The Regent was found the
following year, just in time for Napoleon to have it set into his coronation sword in 1804.

It’s Tuesday 21 October. In the amphitheatre of the École du Louvre, Professor Morgan Belzic is talking about Greek sculpture as an antidote to time. The arms of the statues on the Parthenon’s pediment, he says, are carved so finely that it is possible to see the veins on their wrists. And yet they were meant to be seen from twelve metres up. “They are not made for the eyes of men,” he sighs, “but for the eyes of the gods.” It’s the same line spoken by the protagonist of Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, a tomb raider played by Josh O’Connor, when he steps into an Etruscan tomb full of marbles and sculptures. The Professor’s voice grows more solemn: “The artist dies twice. The first time when he leaves the world of the living. The second, when his work is stolen: taken from its context, from memory, from the possibility of being seen.” He pauses, then adds: “These are very difficult days for our museum. The whole world is watching us closely, but the loss is not just ours. It belongs to the generations to come, to the people who might have walked through these rooms and drawn from the beauty, the complexity, the light of these jewels.”

This is a opinion feature, originally published in Vogue Italia on January 2026, you can find the original article here
What I Learned From Spending the Holidays Offline (and With a Dumb Phone)

By the end of 2025, being offline had somehow become aspirational. Vogue Business had already declared that “being offline is the new luxury”, but the idea itself was hardly new. For years, articles, studies and opinion pieces had returned to the same promise: that stepping away from technology might offer a form of relief.
For those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s—myself included—Instagram is not simply a social media platform but an extension of identity, a place where friendships, ambitions and self-image all coexist. Yet it is also from this same generation that some of the strongest signs of resistance are beginning to emerge. The desire is not to disappear, but to recover a degree of autonomy over one's time and attention. At the centre of this shift sits an object that, until recently, belonged almost entirely to the past: the dumb phone.

In Air Mail's Christmas wish list, fashion writer Rachel Tashjian suggested giving a Motorola to a friend as a holiday gift: “the gift of a life liberated from endless scrolling and the dull hum of social media.” The appeal is easy to understand. Dumb phones—devices capable of little more than calling and texting, though some now include maps or WhatsApp—have become a symbol of a growing desire to establish some distance from the systems that increasingly mediate everyday life. Prompted by these questions, I returned to Italy for Christmas with a fairly specific plan: to spend at least a month without social media and, if possible, use a dumb phone in my day-to-day life. Where, I wondered, would all the time I devoted so faithfully to the internet actually go?

The experiment began with Instagram. The first thing I noticed was that I finally finished all the books that had been sitting half-read on my bedside table. I found myself wandering through Google Earth without any particular destination in mind, zooming into streets and cities simply out of curiosity. I read every print newspaper I could find around the house. Instead of opening apps designed to keep me scrolling, I visited magazine homepages directly and read articles intentionally, one by one. As Christmas approached, my thinking became more radical. Would I be willing to delete my account altogether? Would I actually be prepared to give up my iPhone?

The first time I seriously considered the possibility was almost three years ago on the Milan metro, when a young man stopped me to ask for directions. He held up an old Nokia to explain why he needed help. The following year I met a woman in Amsterdam carrying a similar phone. She told me that navigating the city wasn't the difficult part—eventually she had learned her way around perfectly well, the real challenge was everything modern life assumes a smartphone can do: boarding a flight, accessing a concert ticket, confirming a reservation, organising travel. The more I looked, the more examples I found. “I felt full of things that weren't mine,” Martina, 24, told me after deciding to leave social media during the Christmas holidays. “I feel better now. I watch long YouTube videos, films, and I have much less FOMO.”

Eventually, I bought a dumb phone of my own. I inserted the SIM card, switched the phone on and carried on with my day. The first sensation was surprisingly physical: a sudden feeling of vulnerability. I was no longer in the city where I had grown up, and without maps I felt strangely adrift. Over the following days, navigating the city became the most obvious challenge. I relied on paper maps, asked strangers for directions and frequently took the wrong turn. Somewhat unexpectedly, I also felt incredibly cool.

I made an enormous number of phone calls. I realised that as long as I was with other people and could rely on them for practical things, everything worked surprisingly well. The real difficulty emerged when I was alone and needed to organise my own movements. Without a smartphone, even simple tasks required anticipation. I had to plan ahead, study routes in advance and make decisions before leaving the house. The change wasn't only logistical. I also had to find new ways of filling the empty spaces of the day—the moments that would previously have been occupied by music in my headphones, WhatsApp conversations or mindless scrolling. I found myself calling people more often, and almost every conversation ended up becoming something larger than the practical reason for which it had begun. There was a peculiar pleasure in that. At the same time, it made me realise how few people genuinely expect to receive a phone call anymore, and how unusual it has become simply to answer one.

There was also the undeniable absurd glamour of the object itself; “Where's your real phone?” people kept asking. The experiment gradually changed the way I spent time alone; beyond finally finishing every book within reach, I began paying closer attention to the people around me and to the ways digital space constantly inserts itself into physical space.
Whenever I discussed the experiment with friends, the conversation inevitably drifted toward social media itself. Many felt that platforms had become increasingly totalising, creating the sense that they no longer actively chose how to spend their time. “They're not really social anymore,” one friend observed, “they're just media.” The conversation often moved into speculation: fantasies about alternative futures, returns to earlier versions of the internet, an Instagram without Stories, platforms less dependent on capturing every available second of attention. Back in 2022, New York Times writer Alex Vadukul reported on a group of self-described “Luddites” who gathered in New York parks to spend time together without their phones. Many of them already used basic mobile devices, often because their parents had imposed them during adolescence.

For a few weeks, I became more aware of how much of my day had been structured by habits that felt voluntary but often weren't. Without social media constantly absorbing fragments of time, those fragments did not disappear; they simply became available again. Some were filled with books, conversations and long walks. Others with boredom, which turned out to be less frightening than I had remembered. The internet remains one of the most extraordinary tools ever created, capable of opening worlds that would otherwise remain inaccessible. The problem is not abundance itself, but the difficulty of navigating it consciously. Algorithms are remarkably effective at recognising our tastes and feeding them back to us in increasingly refined forms, transforming preference into habit and habit into reflex. There is one thing they cannot ultimately decide for us: where we place our attention. Within the endless constellation of content competing for it, the choice of what deserves our time remains one of the few genuinely valuable forms of agency we possess. And perhaps that, more than deleting an app or replacing a phone, is what being offline is really about.

This is a brief personal essay

We will not live forever, but we can try

I’ve grown increasingly irritated by my own fear of aging: the split second of hesitation before I say “twenty-three”; the number of times this year I’ve said “twenty-two” as if rounding down could grant me some mysterious advantage; the mild terror when I remember that I am no longer seventeen, that soon I will be twenty-five, then thirty, then forty. I don’t want to become the kind of person who dreads their birthday, so I did what people like me tend to do: I invented a theory.
“The Youth Theory” was born in Rome in the summer of 2021, right after a breakup over the phone that felt both petty and catastrophic.I got on a FlixBus from Milan to Rome and moved into my friend Beatrice’s apartment to “study” – which is to say, to be somewhere that wasn’t my own life. Those days had the texture of cotton candy: soft, stretchy, strangely weightless. Each morning I woke up a little less sad, a little further away from the annoying chair in Milan where I’d been spending my first ever exams session. One evening, Beatrice invited me to dinner at her grandparents’ place. They were small, luminous creatures, moving around the terrace trading jokes, teasing each other, conducting the meal with the choreographed precision of a long marriage. In that moment, in the golden Roman light, they stopped reading as “old.” Their hands, their wrinkles, their white hair – all of that dissolved into the wind. I then thought that youth might not be a number that drains away, but something that can appear and reappear under the right conditions. Rome, with its heat and its light and its buses that never come on time, seemed to radiate it on its own.

(Paris is different. Here, youth is intellectual, slightly neurotic. Everyone is running. Everyone is smoking. Everyone is reconsidering their life every seventy-two hours. They leave you, they love you, they run away, they reappear, and then they vanish again, leaving behind only a playlist and a Metro ticket. It’s a restless and fascinating version of youth, but I’ve grown fond of it.
People in Paris build elaborate plans for their lives and then knock them down with a sigh, the way you might erase something from a whiteboard. They are hungry but guarded, incredibly cool and, at the same time, not cool at all – because nothing is less cool than caring this much. Is this maybe what being twenty is?)

This is what I’ve come to call the Youth Theory: that youth is not a narrow window that slams shut at twenty-five, but a recurring state of mind and body that certain contexts – a city, a season, a person – can switch on again. It’s part geography, part private delusion, part unembarrassed love for life. If we’re lucky, and if we keep moving toward the people and places that make us feel alive, youth will keep finding its way back to us: chipped nail polish, pajama shorts, pencil in our hair and all.

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